At the border of juridical world. Barbarism as constitutive trouble of Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right

Tangorra, Manuel
(2022) The Crisis of Freedom. Hegel‘s Elements of the Philosophy of Right After 200 Years — Location: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (13.January.2022)

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  • Tangorra, Manuelorcid-logoUCLouvain
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Abstract
If “das Recht” does not designate a normative horizon divorced from reality, but instead the very actuality of freedom in its objective-becoming, then the philosopher's task cannot be limited to a reflection on the procedural forms of self-determination. It is in this sense that Hegel constructs a discourse on the normative concreteness of spiritual activity, which necessarily implies a knowledge on the obstacles it encounters, of the troubles, crises and pathologies that characterize its development. This is the reason why, within Hegelian philosophy of right, a discourse on the manifestations of barbarism takes shape. Already from the introduction of the Grundlinien (cf. § 20) Hegel explains how juridical progress operates facing the pathological background of human drives, as a process of inhibition of the desiring activity that undermines the stability of social life. Barbarism is not, however, a simple natural element that precedes the spiritual path; it is not the state of nature – merely external, indifferent, and therefore reassuring – that precedes civil state. Quite otherwise, barbarism manifests itself, in all its ambiguity, as an inherent alteration, as the constituent trouble of the spiritual development of European modernity. The aim of our paper will be to retrace two fundamental manifestations of barbarism that play an essential role in the dialectics of objective spirit. Firstly, on the inner edge of the European social space, the rabble emerges as a dysfunctional aftermath of the impoverishment inherent to the model of accumulation in the flourishing industrial economies (cf. § 241- 245). This internal barbarism – which is linked, but not reduced to poverty – does not simply imply the absence of wealth and property; the rabble constitutes a civilizational trouble from the moment it engages a disrupting resentment, an antagonism towards the established institutional order. Therefore, the rabble is specifically a "torment of modern societies" (§ 244) and not a mere natural – or wild, archaic – remanence condemned to be overcome. It emerges as the immanent disorder, as the constitutive impossibility of the modern construction of institutional rationality, which haunts the urban bastions of the nascent bourgeois culture. Secondly, on the outer edge, barbarism comes to characterize non-Western spiritual formations, the nations that fail to form a people, to actualize themselves in an institutional and state objectivity. The universal history that concludes the Hegelian text thus identifies, as a counter-figure to juridical modernity, a pathological human existence, which is nevertheless constitutive of the European civilizing mission. As a border phenomenon, barbarism thus blurs the distinction between interiority and exteriority. It manifests itself both in what rusts the stability of the European social world and in what legitimizes it to go "beyond itself" (§ 246), in the emprise of the colonial mission. At the very heart of his discourse on the normative order, Hegel is forced to deal with the border of rational political societies, which is not an accidental and therefore inessential contingency for the activity of the spirit, but the fundamental fracture that disrupts the experience of the euro-centered modernity.
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Tangorra, M. (2022). At the border of juridical world. Barbarism as constitutive trouble of Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right. The Crisis of Freedom. Hegel‘s Elements of the Philosophy of Right After 200 Years, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269037